Don't mean to sound malicious or ungrateful & I am sure you have seperate project teams, but I sure wish you guys would quit working on enhancements & GUI gimmicks and just focus on getting what we already have running smoothly...

We have an awful lot of sluggish times & even downtime & it just makes it difficult to explain to members especially new ones that have just paid their membership dues why on almost a daily basis they can't get on for x amount of time or that even though the forum is working the administrative functions are not so I can't approve new members right now etc...

I personally would gladly go back several revisions of the software just as long as I could get the same level of consistent service it use to offer.

I also realize that the enhancements & software revisions may have absolutely nothing to do with the problems we are experiencing. might just be growing pains or hardware issues, but again I would like to see the root cause of the issues resolved before we add any more functionality to the software.

Hi LD

You're right. Enhancement means nothing without stability. The slow times are part of some growing pains associated with the move to the new data center and upgrades of equipment. For the most part since the move, speed has increased noticeably but you're right that basic service has been spotty compared to 6 months ago. We're working on the infrastructure problems that cause those times and expect that we'll get each of the problem sorted properly.

Going back several software versions, of course, wouldn't solve problems which are basically hardware and driver related. But I know that doesn't count for much as you try to explain things to your community.

Rest assured -- we will get the reliability issues sorted.

Michael Farris
Infopop Product Evangelist

what hardware does everything run on?

driver issues on a production server?

Hi Flyingember

The specs and equipment types are propietary Infopop information. From time to time we will post things about our data centers and their machines but I'm sure you understand why we wouldn't post a list of hardware and have a public discussion about it.

Michael Farris
Infopop Product Evangelist

Hi Michael,

While I understand keeping the details of your hardware confidential, it would be nice to know something about the hardware we all are running on.

Sometimes it feels like we are deep in the bowels of Drakar Noir.


Robert
JediGirl.com

P.S. Quiz - Anyone remember which computer game had a building named Drakar Noir and what it was like? (no searching the Internet for the answer)

there is the fact that there are only so many scalable, clusterable os's that can handle 1000 concurrent oracle connections (2gb ram there alone) and has mysql support for beta releases, that are a couple years old and still supported.

alpha, ultrasparc or similar I'm thinking, maybe multi-proc xeon's but that's less likely with the ram limit. it's definently running unix or a rarer variant. maybe solaris or an older corporate bsd.

a rarer architecture requires someone to write drivers to work with it, which would explain why a production server has driver issues, the os is not heavily developed for and there aren't many options.

and I thought they were running Windows

Microsoft Windows 98 Second Edition with a special build of Microsoft Personal Webserver integrated with Jakarta Tomcat.

Power in the hands of a few.

You may laugh...but I remember in the 'dotcom' hey day walking through various data centers peering through cages and you'd be amazed by what you saw!! It's no wonder most of them literally dot-bombed

I can understand the curiousity but opening up lists and debate on hardware spec really isn't going to help things. Understanding the dozens of servers involved, their network relationships and the software that runs them is something that requires pretty high level expertise, time and a forum other than a message board to understand. Believe me when I say the speculation about OS, processors and drivers a few posts up confirms the position. Hint: think Linux.

The info also is, of course, propietary. There are some things we do for scalability that no one else in the world does and you can understand why we don't publish that. We're not being obtuse here - just sensible.

http://www.infopop.com/products/opentopic/architecture.html is a good overview.

>>Windows - an interesting side note is that OpenTopic can run on a vanilla Win2K laptop and does for each of the developers. One of the benefits of Java. It's a wee bit slower in that configuration....

Michael Farris
Infopop Product Evangelist

[This message was edited by Michael Farris on May 16, 2003 at 08:29 AM.]